Government
The US broke global trade rules to try to fix climate change – to finish the job, it has to fix the trade system
Joe Biden’s ‘buy American’ effort with EVs likely violated World Trade Organization rules that the US helped create. The US has an opportunity now…
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The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, is now expected to prompt a trillion dollars in government spending to fight climate change and trillions more in private investment. But the law and Biden’s broader “buy American” agenda include measures that discriminate against imports.
One year in, these policies, such as the law’s electric vehicle subsidies, appear to be succeeding at growing domestic clean energy industries – consider the US$100 billion in newly announced battery supply chain investments. But we believe the law also clearly violates international trade rules.
The problem is not the crime but the cover-up. Today’s trade rules are ill-suited for the climate crisis. However, simply tearing them down could hinder economic growth and climate progress alike.
If U.S. leaders instead take responsibility for forging an improved international trade system – rather than denying the violations of trade rules or pointing fingers at similar transgressions by trade partners – they could help put the global economy in a better position to weather increasing climate-related trade tensions.
Building, then violating WTO rules
The United States has shaped international trade rules more than any other country.
In the 1940s, the U.S. proposed rules that were eventually largely adopted as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, or GATT, a series of multinational agreements to reduce trade barriers. The most ambitious of the GATT agreements was the U.S.-instigated Uruguay Round of the 1990s, which created the World Trade Organization.
Some WTO rules are vague, but others are crystal clear, including an unambiguous prohibition of subsidies contingent on the use of domestic products instead of imports. Certain provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act do exactly that, such as the electric vehicle subsidies that require a large percentage of parts to be produced in North America.
The choice facing U.S. policymakers was between accepting the Inflation Reduction Act, including its rule-breaking, protectionist elements, or missing the small window to pass federal climate legislation.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) explicitly refused to provide the 50th vote needed to pass the law if it wasn’t to his liking, and among his asks was domestic sourcing requirements. More broadly, any meaningful climate legislation that does not support the local economies of fossil fuel-heavy regions may be dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate.
Without the Inflation Reduction Act, however, the U.S. had next to no chance of meeting its climate commitments, which would have dampened climate policy momentum across the world.
U.S. leaders might have been justified in begging for forgiveness after passing the legislation rather than asking for permission to violate trade rules. Instead, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, said his team reviewed the international trade laws very carefully and found no violations.
Instead of an apology, U.S. leaders have said, “You’re welcome,” arguing that the subsidies will benefit other countries by accelerating the deployment of clean energy technologies and lowering costs.
While there is strong evidence to support this argument, it falls flat from a country that has failed to fulfill its obligations to take federal action on climate change for decades and just violated trade laws it has held others accountable to for so long. India’s power minister accused the West of hypocrisy, saying the Inflation Reduction Act’s protectionism will inhibit the energy transitions in developing economies.
The real concern: Rising protectionism
The Inflation Reduction Act contains a fundamental contradiction. Its promise to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions relies on the rapid diffusion of technologies, knowledge and finance across borders. Yet, its domestic subsidies may accelerate the adoption of trade barriers that inhibit these same cross-border flows, thus slowing progress on climate change.
Moreover, the investments it catalyzes will immediately benefit the U.S. economy, while the shared benefits of technological progress and emissions reductions will unfold over many decades for other countries. In the intervening years, other countries may respond with protectionist policies of their own.
Indeed, the real concern might not be the opening salvo, but the shootout of growing protectionism that ensues. For all its drawbacks, the growth in international trade since World War II has led to immense economic progress in much of the world, including the United States. The WTO and its predecessors have been instrumental in reducing harmful tariffs and providing a consistent set of trade rules to which countries are supposed to adhere.
The Biden administration is attempting to assuage these concerns by forging agreements that make more foreign producers eligible for Inflation Reduction Act subsidies. But, in our view, bespoke agreements with a handful of countries aren’t enough. A new vision is needed for international trade rules that support low trade barriers and “green industrial policies” alike.
An opportunity to modernize international trade
Global trade rules have not been updated in a generation. They are sorely in need of reform.
The usefulness of the WTO is contingent on most parties agreeing that its rules are worth following. Without a new working consensus and backing from the largest powers with effective vetoes, the organization will become irrelevant.
The first step to fixing the situation is to stop denying the problem or digging deeper holes, such as the United States’ ill-advised blocking of appointments to the WTO’s dispute settlement Appellate Body since 2017 to protest what it sees as overreach by the body.
More proactively, the U.S. can reestablish its commitment to trade rules by instigating a process to develop equitable reforms.
That could begin with a global summit to discuss the changes necessary to reflect new realities. High-level leadership from the United States would add considerable heft to the ongoing efforts to reform global trade rules.
Any fundamental rewrite of WTO rules will be a long and painstaking process. Instead, it may be sufficient to add a few clauses to existing agreements – like GATT Articles 20 and 21, which deal with exceptions to the trade rules – that clearly and transparently recognize that governments will need to nurture emerging domestic industries to cut emissions fast, ensure energy security and support vulnerable economies.
New rules could limit and define the appropriate use of green subsidies, carbon border tariffs, export and import controls and supply chain coordination. For example, the U.S. and other developed countries could agree to limit subsidies’ domestic sourcing requirements to only emerging, innovative clean technologies that require public support to commercialize. Building on this, all countries could work toward an explicit list of clean energy, transport and industrial technologies needed by all that can be traded with reduced or minimal tariffs.
Of course, these trade tools would have to be managed carefully to avoid proliferating and exacerbating tensions.
In the meantime, since U.S. leaders are already acting as if these rules exist, they’ll have to accept that other countries’ leaders may act similarly — a new Kantian Golden Rule for trade.
It may turn out that the United States did the world a favor by throwing off the shackles of outdated trade rules. That will depend on whether U.S. leaders take advantage of the opportunity to reframe the discussion around the country’s recent legislation as steps toward a modernized international trade regime that better aligns with the world’s climate goals.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
subsidies economic growth white house senate tariffs global trade india european
Government
Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?
Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?
Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The headlines coming out of the Super…
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Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.
With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.
The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.
Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).
Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.
When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.
High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.
There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.
Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.
Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.
The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.
More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.
St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.
Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.
In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.
2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.
Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.
Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Government
Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence
Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The…
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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”
Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”
The agency searched for such data and did not find any.
“The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.
“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.
The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.
The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.
There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.
President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.
President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.
“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.
Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.
“By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.
The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.
“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.
“This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”
The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.
A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.
Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”
Government
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate…
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Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.
A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.
Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels
Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.
In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.
According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.
But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.
“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”
The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.
“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”
The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.
1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID
COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.
Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence
When Military Rule Supplants Democracy
Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study
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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?
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